Risa Goluboff is the 12th, and the first female, dean of the School of Law. She is a nationally renowned legal historian whose scholarship and teaching focuses on American constitutional and civil rights law, and especially their historical development in the 20th century.

In addition to numerous shorter works, Goluboff is the author of two books. Her first book, The Lost Promise of Civil Rights (Harvard, 2007), won the 2010 Order of the Coif Biennial Book Award and the 2008 James Willard Hurst Prize. Her second book, Vagrant Nation: Police Power, Constitutional Change, and the Making of the 1960s(Oxford, 2016) was supported by a 2009 John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Constitutional Studies and a 2012 Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. Goluboff is also co-editor (with Myriam Gilles) of Civil Rights Stories (Foundation Press, 2008).

In 2008, Goluboff received the Law School’s Carl McFarland Award for excellence in faculty scholarship, and in 2011 the University of Virginia's All-University Teaching Award.She is an affiliated GAGE scholar at the Miller Center and a faculty affiliate at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies. In 2012, Goluboff was named a distinguished lecturer by the Organization of American Historians. Between 2011 and 2016, she directed the University’s JD-MA in History Dual Degree Program. Goluboff has served as a visiting professor at Columbia, Chicago and New York University law schools.Prior to joining the Law School in 2002, Goluboff clerked for Judge Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and Justice Stephen Breyer of the U.S. Supreme Court.

"Dispatch from the Supreme Court Archives: Vagrancy, Abortion, and What the Links Between Them Reveal About the History of Fundamental Rights," 62 Stan. L. Rev. 1361 (2010).SSRN | HeinOnline (PDF)

"The Thirteenth Amendment and a New Deal for Civil Rights," in Alexander Tsesis, ed., The Promises of Liberty: The History and Contemporary Relevance of the Thirteenth Amendment 119 (Columbia University Press, 2010)

"The Department of Justice and the Thirteenth Amendment," in Alexander Tsessis, ed.,The Promises of Liberty: Thirteenth Amendment Abolitionism (Columbia University Press, 2010).

Book Review, 27 Law & Hist. Rev. 222 (2009) (reviewing Nancy MacLean, Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (2006)).HeinOnline (PDF)

“Civil Rights History Before, and Beyond, Brown,” in Why the Local Matters: Federalism, Localism, and Public Interest Advocacy 11 (Liman Public Interest Program at Yale Law School and the National State Attorneys General Program at Columbia Law School, 2009).

"'Let Economic Equality Take Care of Itself': The NAACP, Labor Litigation, and the Making of Civil Rights in the 1940s," 52 UCLA L. Rev. 1393 (2005). HeinOnline (PDF)

"The Unusual Journey of Vernon Lawhorn, Sam Austin, and the Green Brothers: Reverse Migration, Agricultural Work, and Rights Consciousness in World War II," in Eric Arnesen, ed., The Human Tradition in Labor History (SR Books, 2003).

"'We Live's in a Free House Such as It Is': Class and the Creation of Modern Civil Rights," 151 U. Penn. L. Rev. 1977 (2003).HeinOnline (PDF)